Monday, September 29, 2008

Hey, remember when I used to hate the post office? Yeah I'm back on that.

So recently a certain unnamed xbf sent me all the stuff that we'd been storing at his parents' house. I was grateful for some of it, like my prom dresses, graduation robe (I was valedictorian, did you know that?) and photo albums. Some of the stuff, eh, not so much. Like the 3 boxes of VHS tapes that I've since replaced with DVDs. Or the stuff that I've been living without for 3 years anyway so didn't really miss. Or the stuff that was never mine to begin with. Long story short, I've been listing things on ebay & craigslist lately.

One of the things was a shiny new purse which sold for $10, and I charged $5 shipping. I mean seriously, it's a purse. It weighs nothing. It's not that big. So I got my $15 via paypal today and Jay had the perfect sized box. It just so happens that it was a priority mail box that something had been shipped to us in, so he flipped it inside out and it magically became a standard brown cardboard box.

So off to the post office. After waiting in line for about half an hour because apparently they've instituted some new policy where no matter how busy they get, they always have to have one person not behind the counter, to "help" the people in line. It doesn't matter if there are 50 people in line and none of them need help - one person on the floor and one person behind the counter, instead of two people behind the counter. It's an awesome system.

Anyway, we get up to the counter finally, and I hand the lady the box to be shipped. She flipped it over and says "this is one of ours, isn't it? I can tell it's a priority box. You have to pay priority to ship it." We pointed out that it didn't actually say priority anywhere on it, and she used her ghetto-ass long fake nails to try & pry the glued seams open. You still couldn't see anywhere that it said priority - you could just see that the other side was white. Then she told us it would be $8 to ship it regular, but since it was so obviously priority, it would be $10. Well, she had not made friends with us today, so we were like "we'll just get another box" when really we went a block away to the UPS Store.

For some reason they charged a "delivery area surcharge" which put the total at just over $16. So it actually cost me over a dollar to send that purse. Just because some lady insisted that she could tell that it was a priority box. Strangely enough, UPS couldn't tell it was a USPS box.